Glaring gall, wealth, aggression, ambition, the hunger to win at all costs-these are the qualities we value now in the second Gilded Age that one suspects will not survive the decade's end. The quality revealed in the show of Princess Diana memorabilia beginning its tour of North America is something quite different.

It is kindness. What shocks me is how unfamiliar it is, for we haven't seen kindness allied with glamour and beauty since Aug. 31, 1997 when Diana died in terror and pain, drowning in her own blood as the cameras flashed. Her heart was literally broken.

Where is she now? I quote from Feminine Gospels by the great poet Carol Ann Duffy, where she describes the state of the Diana we knew.

Dead, she's elegant bone
in mud, ankles crossed,
knees clamped, hands clasped,
empty head.

Or I think of those clipped words in The Duchess of Malfi: "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young."

It is difficult not to view Diana: A Celebration, which opens this weekend at Toronto's Design Exchange, with a bitter sadness. It includes her childhood notes to daddy, her ballet and tap shoes, a selection of Diana's beautiful constricting dresses, a picture of her starved body dancing with her stick-like arms wrapped around her cold comfort of a husband and, most movingly, tape spools of her just as her younger brother Charles described her in his eulogy, with "a laugh that bent her double."

But the theme of this show is hypocrisy. It reveals itself at every level in its understated English way.

For all Earl Spencer's devotion to his sister's memory after her death, it hardly matches his arrogant cruelty to her during her life. He was given the whip hand by the mere fact of his being male. He refused to provide her a bolthole on the Althorp estate when she was alive. Paul Burrell's remarkable book, A Royal Duty, quotes from Mr. Spencer's vicious letter telling her to get good treatment for her "mental illness" and his demand for the return of the Spencer tiara.

Yes, it is a fact that all families tear each other with daggers when scythes aren't available, and the Spencers are no different. But hypocrisy, or at least irony, is rife.

First, profits from the show go to a fine charity campaigning against the cluster bombs the British dropped happily on Iraq, killing 1,000 civilians immediately and more to follow from the bomblets, according to a Guardian report. Diana's ghost shudders.

Second, they can't go to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, because it was staffed by upper-class fools who blew up the charity by suing the Franklin Mint for selling tasteless memorabilia to the American peasantry. (I can't see it's any worse than that small-headed, girly-gowned Royal Doulton nonsense.)

Third, those same toffs fired Paul Burrell, Diana's devoted butler for what appears to have been his increasing social stature. It is difficult not to conclude that they felt a mere servant was rising above his station.

Fourth, the entire power of the state, thanks to the Spencers and the dumb-cluck Royals, landed on Mr. Burrell for an alleged crime: possessing gifts from the dead Diana. He was bankrupted and driven almost to suicide simply because Diana's kindness to Mr. Burrell in flinging gifts at him-she did this to everyone she knew and like and especially to the tiny cadre of those whose loyalty was certain-seemed unreal to the upper classes who encouraged the police to bring a ludicrous case against him. And what a PC Plod investigation it was.

Lady Sarah McCorquodale, Diana's redheaded sister, told the court she wouldn't expect a servant to have more than "cuff links, photographs in frames, enamel boxes, tiepin, ties, and I think that would be all." And no gruel at Christmas, no repatching of the hovel, no rotting vegetable matter for his meagre dinner?

Fifth, Mr. Burrell says Diana wanted her wedding gown to go to the Victoria & Albert Museum, which has a splendid collection of just such treasures and by chance is so desperate for visitors and cash that it's shoving one of those appalling Libeskind ice cube messes into its elegant structure just to get attention. The wedding dress is not a Spencer dress; it's the nation's dress since the British nation rejoiced that terrible day when a gentle, kind young girl married Big Ears while his mistress-in-waiting schemed inside the church.

None of these hypocrisies do a palpable disservice to the Diana: A Celebration display, which is beautifully presented and which brought me close to tears as I watched it being assembled this week. Please visit the show and take from it every joy possible.

I do not fault Earl Spencer, who doubtless loved his sister in his own way. I do condemn the British government, which makes it necessary to fight still against the cluster bomblets that tear off the small, soft limbs of brown-skinned children around the world even now. I wonder at Lady Sarah, who has donated a grey suit of Diana's, the one she was photographed wearing as they giggled together. As an aristocrat, she was entitled to it-Lady Sarah isn't some grubby little forelock-tugger.

But it doesn't do to view this skilled and loving summary of Princess Diana's life without being aware of all the bumpy complications hiding beneath the surface. The hounding of Paul Burrell and a multitude of other unkindnesses poke up through the smooth weave of the silk gowns, the tulle veil, the felt of her tiny red school uniform.

Princess Diana was a kind, loving woman who did remarkable things for our world with a strength whose source no one could fathom. But she lived in a nest of cobras. I can hear them hissing still